I need this to be cleaned up, rearranged and big words broken down to be simply understand. Also please add to my closing paragraph with my identity
The legacy of slavery
Black Atlantic is a phrase coined by Paul Gilroy. Paul Gilroy wrote a book inviting us to think about the legacy of slavery. The black Atlantic is an idea but we can also think about the black Atlantic as a tool, a map, way of seeing, it allows us to navigate our past and orient ourselves in the present as a way to look towards the future.
An invitation towards empathy!
What does it mean to be born into a country which has been at different times both open to that immigration and hostile to it
In black Atlantic as a proposition asks a question How do i understand who i am?
Double consciousness is a term tht was first coined by W.E.B Du Bois is a black person of looking at the world twice over. Once through your own eyes, twice through eyes of a white society tht looks at you as something strange or alien-something not like them! This is the quintessential experience of the black person in a white society!
If we imagine the routes that slaves ships took from Europe to Africa to the Americas to the Carribean! Gilroy postulates that these routes across the Atlantic are in a way inscribed into the ocean tht together make up a shared history a shared identity but also a route towards
“If we respect and honor the idea of a world which we all have a shared stake in whatever our color, then the Black Atlantic is one of the routes towards understanding that”
The Black Atlantic refers to the transnational, fractal structure of “cultural and political exchange and transformation” (15) among Black peoples in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. It exceeds the limits of nationalist and ethnic absolutist boundaries that have been used to demarcate lines of political and cultural expression in dominant narratives of modernity, which have been Eurocentric and Africentric.
1 example-chpt 1 He looks primarily at cultural studies on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly among white English and Black American cultural historians, who rely on absolutist nationalist and ethnic notions to analyze the character and contours of modernity.
2ex in Chpt 2-Gilroy elaborates on the failures of Eurocentric notions of modernity, noting how racial slavery was integral to Western civilization, yet race and role of slavery are absent from contemporary debates. He demonstrates that the memory of slavery is an important interpretive device for intellectuals and artists of the Black Atlantic, who, unlike their Euro-American counterparts, have a sense of modernity’s complicity with racial terror. This sense is integral to their production of a counterculture that challenges Euro-American conceptions of modernity, the modern self, and the boundaries of political expression.
3 ex chpt 3 In the third chapter, Gilroy elaborates on the limits of ethnic absolutism, particularly the ways that Black Atlantic music has been used to uphold notions of ethnic particularity, despite its transnational character.
Paradoxically, it is the transnational character of Black Atlantic music that allows the development of discourses of racial authenticity. At the same time, analysis of these musical cultures through the Black Atlantic framework illustrates how the music itself calls nationalist and ethnic absolutist notions into question.
To illustrate his points about the transnational and intercultural character of Black Atlantic political and expressive production, as well as the vital role that travel and the politics of location play in this cultural output, Gilroy analyzes the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright in the fourth and fifth chapters, respectively. For both writers, key themes are the confrontation between roots and routes, and the role of travel on transcending particularistic notions of race and nationality. Reading their lesser-known work intertextually with their more popular work, and reading their bodies of work intertextually with that of their European counterparts, demonstrates Du Bois’s and Wright’s ambivalence toward the West and the doubleness that characterizes their understandings and articulations of modernity.
Gilroy concludes his analysis in the last chapter with an extended discussion of the concepts of diaspora and the memory of slavery as interpretive devices in the expressive culture of the Black Atlantic. Diaspora is significant because it is indicative of the intercultural hybridity of Black Atlantic political culture, and it holds important clues about modernity’s complicity with the brutalizing of certain populations. The memory of slavery illustrates modernity’s complicity with racialized terror. Taken together, diaspora consciousness and the memory of slavery are key components of the shifting, recombinant quality of Black identity as a political strategy in the modern world.
The association between slavery and modernity is an enduring element of Gilroy’s analysis. Although he notes contemporary critics’ inability to adequately interpret this connection in literal terms, he also looks to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as an indication that early modern thinkers were aware of it. Furthermore, this association takes a leading role in the production of a Black modern counterculture. Douglass’s autobiographies are a prime example, as they all recount his experience of slavery and escape, informing the subjectivity that helps him articulate his understanding of modernity. The Jubilee Singers also serve as a prime example, as their use of “slave songs” on the international stage was a counter to the stereotypical images of Blackness that were made popular by minstrelsy.
The association between slavery and modernity is also important because it is the origin of the doubleness that is articulated in the work of later modern thinkers, such as Du Bois and Wright. However, as Gilroy illustrates in his discussion of Africentrism, not all Black thinkers see this association as generative of Black thought. For Africentrists, slavery and modernity are interruptions to the linear progress of African civilization and Black people, and they tried to obliterate Black
Part 2-Considering questions of identity and nationhood (video)
The Black Atlantic as a proposition asks a question, how do I understand who I am?
Double consciousness which was termed by WEB Du Bois. This is the quintessential experience of the black person in a white society
Its simply this acknowledgment tht the world is inevitably complicated all of our origins are made up of histories and past and memories and places that are compound are layered on top of each other are stitched together across time across place who all of us are inevitably cosmopolitan
The proposition of the Black Atlantic which says lets orient how we look and how we consider the world with an understanding of Black experience of black identity as a singular force within the making of the world!
In black Atlantic as a proposition asks a question How do i understand who i am? I do not identify with one race or one culture. I consider myself to be multiracial. Like most Americans now, not many of us can check one box to identify with one race. I am a descent of African American, Native American and Hispanic race. I’m proud to represent all of my heritage. As a young girl I went to our family’s Pow-Wow. I celebrate Cinco de Mayo and Juneteenth. My Mom has dual-citizenship here and in Panama, I go with her back home on yearly trips. I’m bilingual. I’m proud of my identity.